Drill Station 3 : Handling Oval

It's NASCAR, baby! Go straight. Turn left. Go straight. Turn left. Go straight. Turn left.

Walkthrough

Ok, so it's a little more complicated than "Go straight, turn left." but you are going in a circle over and over again. It's fun, though - trust me.
One of the interesting things in this drill is that there are a lot of cones out there, but you really only need to pay attention to two of them: cone 1 and cone 10. Those cones are your apex cones, and they are late apexes.
So you start out and head in a straight line parallel to cones 1-6. Depending on your car, you may still be accelerating at cone 6, or you may need to slow down.
As you pass cone 6, you want to start looking out your driver's side window in the general vicinity of cone 10. That will be weird at first, but you'll get used to it.
Get a lot of your turning done early, while you're going slower, so that you get the car on an arc that will go close by cone 10 as soon as possible.
As the nose turns toward cone 10, add some throttle if traction allows. Remember, you want to be tangent to cone 10 as you pass by it.
As you head toward cone 10, aim to almost kiss it with your left front tire and accelerate as traction allows.
As you pass the apex at cone 10, begin to unwind the the steering wheel and add throttle in a smooth motion. Imagine a string between your right toes and your right hand - as the pedal goes down, you need to bring the steering wheel back to center.
At some point along the straight between cones 11 and 15, you'll actually be going parallel to the cones. At this point you should be under full throttle with no steering input.
As you approach cone 15, brake as necessary to reach a speed where you can turn in and head for cone 1 like you did for cone 10 in the first half of the oval.
Repeat until you're dizzy or the instructor cries "Uncle!" :-)

Video and Pictures

s3.gif (21KB)
Drill Station Map (details)

ErikOval-InCar.jpg (23KB)
ErikOval-InCar.mpg (24.2MB)

It was raining, so this was the only footage of the slalom station. This was one of my better runs, and I was refining my braking zones the portion of the line associated with braking.

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Last Modified Fri May 23 2003 19:46:42 PDT